Go! To Sleep Airlines

It’s never explained in this article why they think pilots fell asleep while flying and overshot their destination. Come on! It was a 45-minute flight!

Just imagine that voice recorder. Let’s hope it didn’t capture any z’s.

All I can say, in this case at least, is thank god for autopilot. Then again, maybe it was because of the autopilot that they kicked back and had a nap.

>I’d Rather Be In Jail Than In The Ground

>Here’s a piece of advice for women who have suicidal, homicidal x-boyfriends and the police tell you that if you call them one more time about him, they’ll arrest you both. If you really feel he’s going to kill you, go ahead and call. you’ll be in jail, but you’ll both be alive.

god damn this story makes me sad. I don’t know how many times Natasha Hall called police, but this sounds like a story I heard all too often when I volunteered at the women’s shelter. Not all police realize a lot of these guys are pretty deranged and don’t give a flying fuck about restraining orders. Granted, they should know this by now, it’s been demonstrated again, and again, and again, but they don’t.

I’m out of words, and tragically, so is Natasha Hall.

They’re Gonna Laugh When Everybody Hears, Your Name

This isn’t really interesting, only funny. I got a telemarketer call. It was a run of the mill call. After the regular short pause, a voice came on and said, “Hello. Is this Carin?” I answered. Then he said, “Hi Carin. My name is Sam Malone…” after that, I was a lost cause. I held it together for, hmmm, 5 seconds? Yeah. That sounds about right. After he got through about three quarters of his first sentence, I couldn’t resist. I asked him if he in fact said his name was Sam Malone. When he said yes, uproarious laughter ensued! I’m such a jerk.

I tried once again to get it together and apologize to this hapless fellow who was probably named long before Cheers was created, but Steve heard me say this and yelled “nooooorm!” This sent me into another fit of laughter. I’m sure poor Sam Malone was about ready to kill me. Me, and the other stream of callers who just laughed him off the phone today, and every day, all the damn time…

If Sam Malone has a blog, I think today it would say, “today I got laughed at for my name…again…by some blind chick who wouldn’t even take my mail literature. If I ever find either Ted Danson or the producers of cheers, they’ll rue the day they crossed the real Sam Malone!”

On the other hand, maybe it’s an effective tactic. After the caller feels bad for basically laughing in the guy’s face for having what would be a pretty ordinary name, they want to make themselves feel better by giving generously to his charity. That must be it. Otherwise, why would he keep giving out his whole name? Why not just say your name is Sam? If the policy is that you must give your full name, why not make this one guy an alias for the sake of his sanity? In any case, the Police and Firefighters’ Games Fund may be getting some money from me. Maybe I can leave a note that says “Tell Sam Malone I’m sorry.”

In The Mood For What?


Over the years I’ve heard the song In The Mood by Glenn Miller at least a few thousand times, but when it came on the radio today something occurred to me. Does anybody other than Glenn and maybe the rest of the orchestra actually know what he’s in the mood for? It’s kind of hard to tell since we don’t have any lyrics to work with. Sure we can go with the obvious and likely correct answer and say sex, but what if we’re wrong? You know what they say about assuming things, and if there’s one thing you’ll never catch me doing it’s making an ass out of myself.

“Oh Steve,” I hear you sigh. “It’s just a happy little song about sex or love or walks in the park or sunny days or maybe even fluffy kitty cats. Why can’t you just be happy and enjoy the music?”

“Well,” I hear me respond, “because I wanna know.”

Enjoying the music isn’t the issue. I love that song. I just want to know what it is I’m enjoying. Sure it might sound all happy and fun, but when you’ve been watching people for as long as I have, you tend to learn a few things. Chief among them is that things aren’t always as they appear. So what might sound like a walk in the park to you or I could be the musical equivalent of the feeling Glenn Miller gets after he’s just mugged an old woman or kicked a puppy down a flight of stairs. Call me crazy if you want, but who’s going to be laughing when you figure out that all these years you’ve been bouncing around to a song written by a guy who’s singing “baba daba daba, let’s torch a church” in his head every time he plays it? Me, that’s who. Me and perhaps Glenn Miller, wherever he is.

Dear Anti-vandal – Please Put Your Hands Where I Can See ‘Em

61-Year-old Janusz Nowak of Sosnowiec, Poland, has had it with vandalism. To show his displeasure, he recently decided to send a message to his local hoods in the hopes that, I guess, they might just see the error of their ways and go out and get new hobbies. His message? “Dear Vandals – please stop destroying the bus-stop.”

His words committed to paper, there was now the matter of how best to deliver them to their intended target. Hmmm, I assume he thought. Bus-stop. Bus-stop. That’s it! I’ll tack this here strongly worded sign to the bus-stop! Once those little no good whippersnappers see this they’ll be volunteering at soup kitchens before you can say Jack Robinson…provided they’re capable of reading it of course.

His plan was, save for one major flaw, the very definition of perfection. You see, placing signage on public property without proper permits counts as, yes, vandalism. Vandalism for which Mr. Nowak was
promptly arrested.

As they may or may not say in Poland, oopski.

Jail

There’s a new show on myNetworkTV, or at least we just newly discovered it. It’s called Jail. All it is is snippets of people being booked into, well, jail. Usually these folks are the kind of people you may have just seen on Cops getting scooped up.

It’s a pretty enlightening show, and you see lots of weird stuff. You see people who want to wear skin-tight uniforms because they like the way they feel, males who get mistaken for females, maniacs banging any part of their body against any hard surfaces they can find and being put in restraint chairs, oh the list goes on and on. But it got me thinking. How does anyone who works in a jail keep their sanity? All they deal with day in and day out are people who are brought in who don’t want to be there. They’re mostly unpleasant, and if they’re not unpleasant, they’re crying and screaming their innocence, as if that will make the guards change their mind and release them. The guards’ job is simply to keep them safe and get them through the process. No one can be trusted. In a prison, I can at least see some potential for rewarding interactions. Prisoners are there for a long time and come to accept it. There are activities guards can lead. There’s a chance to see progress. But work in a county jail where people come in, get thrown in a cell to either sober up or go to arraignments over and over and over again cannot possibly be rewarding, or at least it has to be extremely rare that something rewarding happens.

It got me thinking. That job has got to suck about six zillion times more than the cycle one sees when doing social work-related jobs. I’m sure the burnout is high, but how does a guard even look forward to going into work the first week? I’m picturing a guard getting ready for work and thinking “What will it be today? Will I get spat on? Shat on? Will I have to break up a fight? Will I have to throw someone in a suicide smock? How about a restraint chair? Maybe I’ll have to throw everyone in lockdown because somebody got a home-made tattoo and we have to find the equipment. Or, on a good day, I’ll just have to shove some unhappy folks through the booking process and I might sustain some scratches and bruises. I can’t wait!”

Maybe someone who works in a jail can set me straight. Honestly, I don’t know how they do it at all. They are better people than I could ever dream of being.

Play Ball!

Am I the only one who’s had more than an assful of all this steroids in baseball stuff? Seriously, doesn’t the United States Congress have anything better to do? The economy is in ruins, your world image has never been worse, 2 separate wars have gotten way beyond out of control, and all these imbeciles are worried about is the integrity of America’s pastime? Baseball is still America’s pastime, right? I ask because spying on the citizenry and finding new and creative ways to do away with civil liberties seem to be big there these days. Honestly, what does it matter if a millionaire who swings a stick for a living shoots himself full of hormones because he wants to put a few more miles on his fastball or add a few feet to a home run? It doesn’t, at least not until America fixes all of its real problems.

I might feel differently if all of these investigations were more about saving lives than busting cheaters and restoring glory to the great game, but that doesn’t seem to be anything that’s on anybody’s radar. if it was, then surely by now there would be hearings into professional wrestling, a sport with an under 50 mortality rate that would blow people’s minds if only it was important enough for the media to cover for more than a couple weeks at a time when something like a
Chris Benoit
happens.